This is the Philip Roth research homepage. Included are lists of the following:
Brief Biography and Awards
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933. He was educated at Bucknell University, where he received his B.A., and the University of Chicago, where he completed his M. A. and taught English. Afterwards, at both Iowa and Princeton, he taught creative writing . His first book was Goodbye, Columbus, whose title novella and five short stories present witty, ironic, and preceptive depictions of Jewish life in the U.S. in a flip, personal style. He is perhaps best known--notoriously so, to many--for his third novel, Portnoy's Complaint, a wildly comic representation of his middle-class New York Jewish world in the portait of Alexander Portnoy, whose possessive mother makes him so guiltily insecure that he can seek relief only in elaborate masturbation and sex with forbidden shiksas. Since then, he has written in a number of different narrative modes, the most significant includes the series of Nathan Zuckerman novels (My Life As a Man, The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Counterlife) and his postmodern (auto)biographies The Facts, Deception, Patrimony, and Operation Shylock. He currently lives in Connecticut. His awards include:
Second prize in the O. Henry Prize Story Contest of 1960 for "Defender
of the Faith"
National Book Award for Fiction in 1960 for Goodbye, Columbus
National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987 for The Counterlife
National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 for Patrimony
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1993 for Operation Shylock
Time magazine's Best American Novel of 1993 for Operaton
Shylock
National Book Award for Fiction in 1995 for Sabbath's Theater
Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for American Pastoral